Field
Various communication systems may benefit from appropriate prioritization of users and/or devices. For example, wireless communication systems may benefit from multi-subscription network prioritization, such as systems for prioritizing subscribers with multiple subscriptions that are using fewer devices than they have subscriptions.
Description of the Related Art
Operators may encounter challenges when seeking to increase revenues by charging for higher levels of wireless quality of service (QoS), for example, where subscribers use a model where they pay in return for receiving higher levels of QoS.
For example, application (app) development application programming interfaces (APIs) and smart phones may not enable apps to utilize such policy and charging rules function (PCRF) based mechanisms. Additionally, billing plans may be composed of a flat number of best effort bytes. This is simple from the end consumer perspective.
In other words, typical subscribers may pay for a fixed number of bytes per month, where traffic is all over best effort services, and does not utilize the PCRF based QoS mechanisms.
In other words, this may present challenges for operators seeking to further monetize subscribers by getting them to pay more in order to get better performance, i.e. difficulty in getting subscribers into the mode of paying for performance.
Operators may drive additional revenue by selling additional subscriptions to each subscriber. For example: a paying subscriber may pay for multiple subscriptions, for example for family members, phones, smart watches, internet of things (IoT) health solutions such as heart rate or movement monitors, IoT in the home and office, connected cars, tablets, and so on. Similarly, enterprises typically have numerous subscriptions. Airborne wireless communication solutions can also increase the likelihood of communication among devices.
Other cooperative subscription groupings may also be based upon the user equipment (UE) operating system (OS) or social or professional enterprise-like network affiliations.
These groups of devices are increasingly communicating with one another. For example, a smart watch may be almost completely reliant on a phone from the same manufacturer. Such communication gives these groups of devices the ability to decide whether to funnel multiple transfers across a single device. Such a choice permits consolidation of transfers from a group of devices.
UEs may save battery life if a single UE among a group of UEs performs a transfer. For example, such an approach may cut the current drain caused by a total transfer size by a factor of 2, where one device performs the entire transfer instead of having multiple (e.g. 4) devices perform separate transfers. However, current networks incentivize subscribers to avoid consolidating transfers onto a smaller number of devices, as this may reduce the overall bit rate achieved. As a result, this incentivizes subscribers to waste both battery life and network resources.
In addition, devices are increasingly communicating using multiple technologies, such as LTE+Wi-Fi or other cellular communication plus wireless local area network communication. This is a mechanism where a single device makes simultaneous use of an additional radio frequency (RF) technology at that same subscriber device to boost performance.
It is possible that even a single UE could utilize multiple subscriptions to obtain higher data rates, in order to extract higher data rates from a network. For example, commercial devices are available where a single UE can have multiple subscriptions or SIM cards. Thus, a single device may be configured to represent itself to the cellular network as multiple different radio resource control (RRC) connected cellular devices. This may become increasingly feasible with UEs utilizing software-defined networking (SDN).